Throne of Stars

by David Weber

  “It looks bad,” Adoula said, his face serious. “But the Navy units I control are on the way. They’ve got enough firepower to get you out of there. But given how complicated and fluid the situation is, I’m afraid these rebels may get their hands on the Empress and the replicator, and we can’t have that. Kill the Empress at once. Dump the replicator.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Khalid said, but he also frowned. “What about us?”

  “As soon as the Navy gets there, they’ll land shuttles to pull you out,” Adoula said. “I can’t afford to lose you, Khalid. We’ve got too much more work to do. Kill the Empress now, then all you have to do is hold out for—” The prince ostentatiously considered his toot. “Hold for another forty minutes,” he said. “Can you do that?”

  “Yes, Your Highness,” the “major” said, squaring his shoulders. “I’m glad you haven’t forgotten us.”

  “Of course not,” Adoula said, and cut the circuit. He looked into the dead display for an instant. “Most definitely not,” he said softly.

  The defensive systems in the secret passage, light and heavy plasma and bead cannon, were momentarily confused. The figure was giving off the IFF of the local defenders, as last updated. In automatic mode, that didn’t matter—not here, in this corridor. But the intruder had paused outside the systems’ area of immediate responsibility, where matters were a little ambiguous. Did its mere presence in the corridor’s entrance represent an unauthorized incursion? If not, its IFF meant it was not a legitimate target, but if it was an incursion . . .

  The systems’ computers were still trying to decide when beads started cracking down-range, destroying the first two emplacements. At which point, they made up their collective electronic minds and opened fire.

  Roger considered it just another test.

  Over the last year the Playboy Prince who’d set out so unwillingly for Leviathan had learned that life put obstacles in one’s path, and one either went around them, if possible . . . or through them, if necessary. This fell under the category of “necessary,” and there weren’t enough bodies left to just throw them in and soak up the losses to take out the emplacements. More than that, he’d proven himself to be better at fast, close combat than any of the rest of the team. Ergo, this was one of those times when he had to put himself in jeopardy.

  He’d killed three of the defensive weapons before they were all up and tracking on him. He killed a fourth, concentrating on the eight heavy emplacements, before the first stream of beads hit him. They knocked him backward, but couldn’t penetrate the ChromSten armor. He got that bead cannon, and then a plasma gun gushed at his feet. He’d seen it tracking, and jumped, getting it while he was in the air. But when he came down, he stumbled, trying to avoid another stream of plasma, and fell to the side. He got the fifth emplacement before the first Raider could make it through the door.

  Funny. He’d thought you were supposed to get cold at the time like this. But he was hot. Terribly hot.

  “This really sucks,” Despreaux said, coughing on smoke.

  The wall, floor—whatever—of Siminov’s office was too hot to touch now. So they’d climbed onto the edge of the desk, dragging Trey and the semiconscious Siminov with them. Some of the smoke came from the lower edge of the desk, which was beginning to smolder. When that caught fire, as it was bound to eventually, they were all going to be in rather desperate straits.

  Despreaux happened to be the one looking at the door when the hand appeared.

  It fumbled for a grip, and she raised her pistol before she noticed that the hand was both very large and covered in an environment suit glove.

  “Hold fire!” she barked as Krindi chinned himself up over the edge of the door frame.

  “So, there you are,” the Diaspran said, showing his teeth in a Mardukan-style pseudosmile behind his mask. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”

  “What took you so long?” Pedi asked angrily.

  “I figured there was time,” Krindi said, dragging himself fully through the doorway. “You were born to hang.”

  “Roger, just lie still!” Penalosa was saying.

  “Hell with that.” Roger got to his feet—or tried to. His lower left leg felt strangely numb, but he got got as far as his right knee, then pushed himself upright.

  And promptly toppled over sideways again.

  “Oh,” he said, looking at the left leg which had refused to support him. Not surprisingly, perhaps, since it was pretty much gone just below the knee. “Now, that’s a hell of a thing. Good nannies, though. I don’t feel a thing.”

  “Just stay down!” Penalosa said sharply.

  “No.” Roger got up again, more cautiously. He looked around and picked up a bead cannon from a suit of armor with a large, smoking hole through its breastplate. “Let’s go.”

  “God damn it, Your Highness!”

  “Just a thing, Master Sergeant,” Roger said. “Just a thing. Can I have an arm, though?”

  “We’ve got the corridor suppressed,” Penalosa said as the two damaged suits of armor limped slowly and painfully down the narrow passageway.

  “I noticed,” Roger said, when they came to the end. It was another ChromSten door.

  “But there’s this,” Penalosa said. “And not only are we about out of plasma cannon, but these are awful tight quarters for trying your little trick. Not to mention that . . . nobody’s too happy about trying it again, anyway.”

  “Nobody” being Penalosa herself and one of the Mardukans, since the other two suits had bought it destroying the last two installations after Roger had gotten the first six.

  “Yes, understandable,” Roger said. “But unlike the last door, Master Sergeant, this one is original installation.” He bared his teeth behind his visor. “Open Sesame,” he said.

  And the door opened upwards.

  “Attention all vessels in planetary orbit! This is Terran Defense HQ! Hostile naval units are approaching Old Earth, ETA approximately eleven-thirty-seven hours Capital Time. All civilian traffic is immediately directed and ordered to clear planetary orbit at once. Repeat, all civilian traffic is immediately directed and ordered to clear planetary orbit at once. Be advised that heavy fire is to be anticipated and that any vessel in a position to pose a threat to Imperial City will be deemed hostile and treated accordingly. Repeat, all civilian traffic is immediately directed and ordered to clear planetary orbit at once, by order of Terran Defense HQ!”

  “Well, about damned time,” Captain Kjerulf muttered as the grim-faced rear admiral on the display screen spoke. The recorded message began to replay, and he turned back to the thousand and one details demanding his attention with a sense of profound relief. He’d been more than a little concerned about the collateral damage which would almost inevitably occur when a full-scale naval engagement walked across the orbital patterns of the teeming commerce which always surrounded Old Earth. At least he didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

  “And it’s about time,” Prince Jackson Adoula muttered as Hannah P. McAllister made haste to obey the nondiscretionary order. There were, quite literally, hundreds of vessels in Old Earth orbit; now they scattered, like shoals of mackerel before the slashing attack of a pod of porpoises. Adoula’s vessel was only one more insignificant blip amid the confusion of that sudden exodus, with absolutely nothing to distinguish her from any of the others.

  Aside from the fact—not yet especially evident—that her course would eventually carry her to meet CarRon 14 well short of the planet.

  Getting to Siminov’s office door was the biggest trick, since the floor was too hot to cross without third-degree burns. Fortunately, Krindi could walk on it in his environment suit, and he could lower them to Erkum, who was standing in a more or less fire-free spot on the ground floor. The gigantic noncom’s height, coupled with the fact that the office had dropped most of the way through the second floor, made it a relatively easy stretch from that point.

  Krindi got all of them out and down just before the last su
pports gave way and the armored room collapsed crashingly into the building’s basement.

  “God, I’m glad to be out of there,” Despreaux said. “On the other hand, I really don’t want to burn to death, either.”

  “Not a problem,” Krindi said. “Erkum, gimme.”

  He hefted his towering sidekick’s weapon only with extreme difficulty, but this wasn’t something to be trusted to Erkum’s enthusiastic notions of marksmanship. Despite its weight, he managed to get it pointed at the side of the building which was least enveloped in flames. Then he triggered a single round.

  The plasma bolt took out the walls on either side and blew a nine-meter hole in the back wall. It would have set the building behind Siminov’s on fire, if that hadn’t already been taken care of some time ago.

  “Door,” Krindi observed as he pulled the power pack out of the plasma gun and tossed the weapon down into the flaming basement. “Now let’s get the polluted water out of here.”

  They scrambled through the plasma-carved passage and into the alleyway between the blazing buildings, then turned and headed for the alley’s mouth. Erkum carried Trey and the well-trussed Siminov, and all of them stayed low, trying to avoid flaming debris until they stumbled out into the fresh morning air at last.

  And found themselves looking into the gun muzzles of at least a dozen Imperial City Police.

  “I don’t know who in the hell you people are,” the ICPD sergeant in charge of the squad said, covering them from behind his aircar. “And I don’t know what in the hell you’ve been doing,” he continued, looking at the team’s body armor and the Mardukans in their scorched environment suits, “but you’re all under arrest!”

  Despreaux started to say something, then stopped and looked up at the armored assault shuttle sliding quietly down the sky. A large crowd had gathered to watch the buildings burn, since the municipal firemen had wisely decided to let them burn as long as plasma fire was being thrown around, and the shuttle had to maneuver a bit to find a spot to land. Despreaux saw a very familiar face at the controls as it settled on its countergravity, and Doc Dobrescu tossed her a salute as the shuttle’s plasma cannon trained around to cover the police holding them at gunpoint.

  The rear hatch opened, and four Mardukans in battle armor unloaded. They took up a combat circle, two of them also sort of pointing their bead and plasma cannon nonchalantly in the general direction of the police.

  And then a final figure stepped out of the shuttle. A slight figure, in a blue dress fetchingly topped off by an IBI SWAT jacket.

  Buseh Subianto slid easily between the Mardukans and walked over to the ICPD sergeant . . . who was now ostentatiously pointing his own weapon skyward and trying to decide if placing it on the ground would be an even better bet.

  “Good job, Sergeant,” Subianto said, patting him on the shoulder. “Thank you for your assistance in this little operation. We’ll just be picking up our team and going.”

  “IBI?” the sergeant’s question came out more than half-strangled. “IBI?” he repeated in a shout, when he’d gotten his breath.

  “Yes,” Subianto said lightly.

  “You could have told us!”

  “Sergeant, Sergeant, Sergeant . . .” the Deputy Assistant to the Assistant Deputy Director, Counterintelligence Division, of the Imperial Bureau of Investigation said. “You know ImpCity data security isn’t that good. Don’t you?”

  “But . . .” The cop turned and looked at the group by the flaming building. “You burned the building down! Hell, you set the entire block on fire!”

  “Mistakes happen.” Subianto shrugged.

  “Mistakes?!” The sergeant threw his hands up. “They were using a tank cannon! A plasma tank cannon!”

  Erkum ostentatiously interlaced his fingers in front of him and began twiddling all four thumbs. He also tried his best to whistle. It was not something Mardukan lips were designed for.

  The sergeant looked at the Mardukans and the very old-fashioned combat shuttle.

  “What in the hell is this?”

  “Sergeant,” Subianto said politely, “have you ever heard the term ‘above your pay grade’?” The sergeant looked ready to implode on the spot, and she patted his shoulder again. “Look,” she said soothingly, “I’m from the IBI. I’m here to help you.”

  Roger limped down the paneled corridor, using the bead cannon as a crutch and followed by Penalosa and the single remaining Mardukan. Dogzard, still in a deep funk, trailed along dead last. From time to time, Roger stopped and either broke down a door or had the Mardukan do it for him.

  A guard in a standard combat suit stepped into the corridor and lifted a bead gun, firing a stream of projectiles that bounced screamingly off of Roger’s armor.

  “Oh, get real,” the prince snarled, shifting to external speakers as he grabbed the guard by the collar and lifted him off the ground. “Where’s my mother?!”

  The strangling guard dropped his weapon and kicked futilely at Roger’s armor, gurgling and making motions that he didn’t know. Roger snarled again, tossed him aside, and limped on down the corridor as fast as he could.

  “Split up!” he said. “Find my mother.”

  “Your Highness!” Penalosa protested. “We can’t leave you unpro—”

  “Find her!”

  “Pity to waste you,” Khalid said, flipping a knife in his hand as he approached the half-naked Empress on the huge bed. “On the other hand, you don’t get many chances at Imperial poontang,” he added, unsealing his trousers. “I suppose I might as well take one more. Don’t worry—I’ll be quick.”

  “Get it over with,” Alexandra said angrily, pulling at the manacle on her left wrist. “But if you kill me, you’ll be hounded throughout the galaxy!”

  “Not with Prince Jackson protecting me,” Khalid laughed.

  He stepped forward, but before he reached the bed, the door burst suddenly open and an armored figure, missing part of one leg, leaned in through the broken panel.

  “Mother?!” it shouted, and somehow the bead pistol holstered at its side had teleported into its right hand. It was the fastest draw Khalid had ever seen, and the mercenary’s belly muscles clenched as the pistol’s muzzle aligned squarely on the bridge of his nose. He started to open his mouth, and—

  The bead pistol whined an “empty magazine” signal.

  “Son of a BITCH!” Roger shouted, and threw the empty pistol at the man standing over his lingerie-clad mother with a knife. The other man dodged, and the pistol flew by his head and smashed into the wall as Roger stomped forward as quickly as he could on his improvised crutch.

  Khalid made an instant evaluation of the relative value of obeying Adoula or saving his own life. Evaluation completed, he dropped the knife and pulled out a one-shot.

  The contact-range anti-armor device was about the size of a large, prespace flashlight and operated on the principle of an ancient “squash head” antitank round. It couldn’t penetrate battle armor’s ChromSten, so it attacked the less impenetrable plasteel liner which supported the ChromSten matrix by transmitting the shockwave of a contact detonated hundred-gram charge of plasticized cataclysmite through the ChromSten to blast a “scab” of the liner right through the body of who ever happened to be wearing the armor. Its user had to come literally within arm’s reach of his target, but if he could survive to get that close, the device was perfectly capable of killing someone through any battle armor ever made.

  Roger had faced one-shots twice before. One, in the hand of a Krath raider, had badly injured—indeed, almost killed—him, despite armor almost identical to that which he was currently wearing. The second, in the much more skilled hands of a Saint commando, had killed his mentor, his father-in-truth, Armand Pahner. And with one leg, and out of ammunition, there wasn’t a damned thing he could do but take the shot and hope like hell he managed to survive again.

  Dogzard was still badly depressed, but she was beginning to feel more cheerful. Her God had gone missing, replaced by a strang
er, but there was something about the rooms around her now—a smell, an almost psychic sense—which told her that her God might come back. These rooms didn’t smell the same as her God, but the scents which filled them were elusively similar. There were hints all about her that whispered of her God, and she snuffled at the wood paneling and the furniture as they passed it. She’d never been in this place before, but somehow, incredible as it seemed, she might actually be coming home.

  In the meantime, she continued to follow the stranger who said he was God. He hadn’t seemed very much like God up until the past little bit. Just recently, however, he’d started acting much more as God had always acted before. The smells of cooking flesh and burning buildings were those she associated with the passage of her God, and she’d stopped and sniffed a couple of corpses along the way. She’d been shouted at, as usual, and she’d obeyed the might-be-God voice, albeit reluctantly. It didn’t seem right to let all that perfectly good meat and sweet, sweet blood go to waste, but it was a dog-lizard’s life, no question.

  Now she was excited. She smelled, not her God, but someone who smelled much the same. Someone who might know her God, and if she was a good dog-lizard, might bring her back to her God.

  She pushed up beside the one-legged stranger in the doorway. The smell was coming from the bed in the room beyond. It wasn’t her God, but it was close, and the female on the bed smelled of anger, just like her God often did. Yet there was fear, too, and Dogzard knew the fear was directed at the man beside the bed. The man holding a Bad Thing.

  Suddenly, Dogzard had more important things to worry about than impostors who claimed they were God.